The blame game

HAVE you ever tripped over on the pavement? Most people who injure themselves like this probably put it down to their own absent-mindedness, clumsinessor maybe even drunkenness. But not everyone. Thousands of people in Britain have gone to court and won compensation on the grounds that their injury was the fault of a negligent local authority.

The word "accident", it seems, is out of favour. Safety officials and public health authorities in Britain and the US, led by the American emergency medical profession, want to get rid of it. They claim that most injuries are preventable and that to attribute them to accidents is irresponsible.

Now the British Medical Journal has jumped on the bandwagon. In an editorial in its 2 June issue, the BMJ declared that it was banning the word "accident" from its pages. Even events such as hurricanes, earthquakes and avalanches are often predictable, it argues. The ...

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